Personal Life
Barker was born to a working-class family in Thornaby-on-Tees in the North Riding of Yorkshire, England, on 8 May 1943. Her mother Moyra died in 2000, and her father's identity is unknown. According to The Times, Moyra became pregnant “after a drunken night out while in the Wrens”, and, in a climate where illegitimacy was regarded with shame, told people that the resulting child was her sister, rather than her daughter. They lived with Barker's grandmother Alice and step-grandfather William, until her mother married and moved out when Barker was seven. Barker could have joined her mother, she told The Guardian in 2003, but chose to stay with her grandmother "because of love of her, and because my stepfather didn't warm to me, nor me to him". Her grandparents ran a fish and chip shop which failed and the family was, she told The Times in 2007, “poor as church mice; we were living on National Assistance – ‘on the pancrack’, as my grandmother called it”. At the age of eleven she won a place at grammar school, attending Kings James Grammar School in Knaresborough and Grangefield Grammar School in Stockton-on-Tees.
Barker, who says she has always been an avid reader, went on to study international history at the London School of Economics. After graduating in 1965, she returned home to nurse her grandmother, who died in 1971. In 1969, she was introduced in a pub to David Barker, a zoology professor and neurologist 20 years her senior, who left his marriage to live with her. They had two children together, and were married in 1978, after his divorce. Their daughter Anna Ralph is now a novelist. Barker was widowed when David died in January 2009.
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